


Loss Ficlet: Not The First Date

by missclairebelle



Series: Loss (Ficlets) [4]
Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 16:36:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14000202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: This is based in the same universe as the multi-part hurt/comfort fic Loss, but is in a different timeline than that story.A few weekends ago, I nagged @ashleyclairee until she gave me a prompt. She mentioned “first date,” and I was sold. Here it is (just read and you’ll get the title, yeah?).





	Loss Ficlet: Not The First Date

**Loss (Modern AU)**  

**Not The First Date**

Walking to meet Jamie Fraser for our first date ( _a real date_ , _one on dry land_ , as he had promised), it struck me suddenly that he had never seen the inside of my flat. For five weeks now I had spent Fridays and Saturdays at his place. At first I had used his manly-scented toiletries and smuggled travel-sized makeup out of my purse. I had only recently started to live out of a small overnight bag on the weekends after he had frowned at me, asking why I didn’t just bring a bag and leave some things in the nightstand.  (“ _The jig is up, Sassenach. I ken ye have girly... needs, so just bring a bag next time, aye?_ ”).

It seemed strange that this was our first date.

Jamie had routinely undressed me, studied my naked (or partially clothed) body with his mouth and eyes and hands and hips, kissed me until I bowed into him belly first, coaxed sounds out of me I had never known were possible, and had whispered words to me that made my toes curl and brain fold in on itself. Jamie had let me sleep (and etcetera) in his bed for days straight.

And yet, I was sure Jamie probably could give no more a description of where I lived than identifying the number of the bus line I sometimes took to get to his place.

* * *

Despite these things we had shared, there were a million mundane things about me and my life that were foreign to him. It wasn’t just the inside of the flat. 

Jamie had never pressed his fingers into the pattern of my cutlery while we ate breakfast or brushed the tips of his fingers along my turquoise cut glass water tumblers. Jamie had never figured out where the bathroom was in relation to my bedroom or figured out that you had to jiggle the flush on the toilet to get it to work. Jamie had never let his bare feet sink into the soft white rug that covered the cold hardwood in my bedroom. Jamie had seen me search for my undergarments on his bedroom floor but never watched me dress for work, solemn and meticulous. Jamie had never had the opportunity to take note of the fact that my scrubs were pressed and hung in the closet while everything else I owned was piled in a disastrous heap of tangled mostly black clothing on the floor of my small closet. Jamie had never felt the impressive surge of yellow warmth that flooded my bedroom when I opened the blackout curtains in the early morning, the light touching every corner and changing the paint color from a light seafoam green color to _almost white_.

Jamie had not yet run his fingers along my bookcase while studying the spines of the books there to see which he had read. (I could hear him: “ _ye love T.S. Eliot, then? me too_ ,” he would say before mumbling “ _April is the cruelest month,” just to make me swoon._ )  Jamie had not smelled the citrus and lemongrass candles on my coffee table that made my entire place smell like an overpriced day spa.  

Jamie had never seen me come home from work, smelling like others’ bodily functions and bone tired, my mascara worked into fine lines around my eyes.  Jamie had not watched me search frantically for the keys to my flat before practically running down the stairs to get out the front door. 

I stopped drafting the litany of firsts when I arrived at the pub - a dilapidated place with peeling black paint and gold letters over the entrance.

Jamie looked the same as he always did when I stepped inside – broad, bronze, a little too handsome. I took a moment to study him, unwinding the scarf from around my neck and adjusting my dress over my hips.  He was just as intoxicating as he always was with the long lines of lean muscle that stretched across mussed bedsheets now covered in jeans and a button down shirt. He had his elbows on the bar and was laughing about something that probably wouldn’t be as funny if it was repeated for my benefit.  His fingertips worked lazily at the label on a bottle of beer as the bartender scrubbed the worn bar.

The nearness of him had the same effect on me it always did. It was a compulsion to fall head first into a breathless anticipation for: his voice, his touch, his gaze. The anticipation rose inside of me while I fluttered and burned from the inside out.

Jamie saw me from the bar before I reached him, smiling almost immediately, and looked me up and down in a way that would have offended me had I not shared his bed that very morning. He rose when I reached him. “Ye look bonny as ever tonight, Sassenach.”

I had spent a good thirty minutes in the mirror getting dressed – trying different undergarments under my dress, adjusting my breasts in different bras, wiping lipsticks and glosses on and off until my lips were swollen and pink just from the effort. It had taken a lot of work to get looking like Date Claire with the ironed hair and smoky eyes.

“Hi.” I wasn’t nervous around him, but my voice was breathy and uncharacteristically thin.  He pulled out a bar stool for me and helped slide my jacket from my shoulders, his fingers lingering at the small of my back.

We drank beer, facing each other on barstools with our knees touching and divulging personal things. Jamie touched my hair and brought it around behind my ear, his eyes sparkling.

The conversation was _easy_ on dry land.

Jamie told me about his sister ( _the woman in the picture_ ), his niece and nephew ( _the kids in the picture_ ), his friend John and his husband David ( _the men in the picture_ ), his brother-in-law Ian (a man who ascended from _best friend_ to _brother_ before officially becoming _family_ ), and the estate where he grew up ( _Lallybroch_ , a word that sounded beautiful coming from his lips and I wanted to hear again to make sure I committed the three syllables to memory).  He told me about his motorcycle accident (“ _was going too fast, bad time in my life… had just gone through some… stuff”_ with a look that said “don’t ask about it, please”) and walked me through the care plan that got him back to his life.  

I told him about Uncle Lamb and Egypt, work, my friend Geillis who was beautiful and steadfast and infuriating and likely the least romantic person I knew. I told him about the trip we had taken to Croatia for her thirty-third birthday, showing him pictures on my mobile with his hand on my thigh. I told him that I hadn’t been on what he characterized as a “real, live date” in years.  When he asked, I told him, dispassionately as possible, that my “dates” in medical school had consisted of cheap, greasy takeaway in Styrofoam containers and sharing lecture notes about the dissection of cadavers. He listened with a smirk as I explained that the “date” would then devolve into fifteen minutes of sex by rote with an only moderately satisfying orgasm.

We walked with a deliberate distance between our bodies to a Spanish restaurant that Jamie claimed had “ _the best paella_.”

There, our conversation continued to come easily but took a serious turn.  He told me about his father’s health problems ( _Brian, a disease Jamie did not name that was taking his father’s mind and had sapped all of his vitality_ ) and a simmering tension with Jenny about who would have Lallybroch ( _there was that word again_ ) when their father passed away.

When Jamie asked if I’d ever been in love I had paused and reached for the last empanadilla at the center of the table and tore it in half. I offered him one of the halves and he took it, wordlessly, and waiting for an answer. I stared at him thoughtfully, chewing. I asked if he really wanted to hear the answer.

He said “yes.” So I told him about Frank – the ebb and flow and the breakup that I had attributed to distance in my twenties but now knew had been well overdue. I told him, without much detail, that it was complicated and messy, and only sometimes happy. I told him that it was love, at first.

I asked him if he had ever been in love. He did not ask if I wanted to know. Instead, he just said “no,” easily. He told me about Annalise de Marillac and how he had been infatuated with her otherness. He offered up, without prompting, that they had lost their virginity to one another under some bleachers at boarding school with four thrusts and a groan. He told me that they had then panicked for three weeks about her possibly getting pregnant even though he had not finished inside of her. He smirked and shook his head the way someone does when they’re telling a story that could have happened a lifetime ago. He spoke her name in practiced French as if it was a distant memory, the look in his eyes steady and detached.

I found myself surprised that I was smiling too. The story was _charming_ and filled out his history.

This did not feel like a first date. And I said so, wiping at my mouth with a linen napkin. Jamie smiled and nodded, reaching across the table and brushing his thumb across my lower lip. 

“Ye missed some.” He wiped his thumb on the napkin that was still in my hand. “And it doesna feel like a first date because we’ve already had a dozen dates. We’ve just never left my place.”

He allowed his words to sink in for a moment before he continued.

“We’ve watched movies. We went to that gala… not together… but may as well have because we danced and left together. We order takeout every weekend, basically like a married couple.”

Sitting across from him, looking at him over a table, I felt something inside of me shift.  

He was right.

We had eaten together before; this dinner was nothing new. It had been a regular occurrence over a number of weekends spent together: Jamie patiently watching me study greasy takeout menus in his bed (wrapped in a rumpled sheet); Jamie watching me search the recesses of his refrigerator for jam while we made toast (wrapped in that same sheet); Jamie frying eggs and potatoes into a hash while I sat on the counter (kicking my feet against his cabinets and wearing his sweatpants).  

We had watched movies on the couch, me falling asleep on him more often than not.  Our positions for movie watching were well coordinated, fully-clothed, and choreographed – my head on his lap with his fingers in my hair or my back to his front, our legs tangled on the chaise at one end of his couch, a pillow behind his head and a blanket tortured to wrap around both of us.

We had shared drinks before; that was nothing new. I had twice picked up a bottle of his favorite whisky without having to call or text to ask what he wanted.

We had serious conversations before, albeit punctuated by frequent intervals of sex.  Jamie had listened to me explain my parents’ death with a clinical detachment that would have been startling to most people. He had somehow known to stay silent, just touching me and listening. He had heard the explanation for the detachment: I had little, save scraps of paper in a shoebox from Uncle Lamb, to remember them by. He knew that I had otherwise been betrayed by my young, forgetful mind and lost their voices and faces and the feeling of their hands years and years earlier.

Jamie had divulged his own mother’s death, but not the details. I knew from the look on his face when not to ask more questions and to just listen.

Despite all of this, the night _was_ qualitatively different – the dance of shuffling menus and refilling wine glasses and falling in and out of silence when the waiter came by and left again and Jamie’s hand lingering when he passed me the salt shaker.

“So no. This isna a first date, really.”

“Well, first date or not, you did a fine job picking a restaurant.” I sipped at my glass of wine, telling myself that I needed to slow down before I got sloppy and ruined the evening in a slur of drunken words.  

“It wasn’t hard. Yer really not hard to figure out with food. I always ken what yer goin’ to order before ye even say.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, intrigued and a little surprised that he was watching me that carefully. “How do you know that?”

“Well, at my place ye always get the shrimp lo mein and ye always go straight for my egg rolls.”

I laughed and shrugged, redirecting my eyes to his hand. It resting on the white tablecloth. I traced the condensation ring where my water glass had been sitting, unable to look up.

“Yer a mystery to me. Yer unfolding, though, in every way that matters. Ye leave little breadcrumbs for me to figure ye out.”

I looked up from the tablecloth. He was giving me a fathomless look that made my insides flip and coil. “Yeah?” I felt like it was the only word left in my vocabulary.

“Yeah,” he echoed. His fingers crept across the tablecloth to cover mine.

When we finished dinner we made our third stop at a bar with church pews for seating and windows fitted with stained glass. If asked whether I liked jazz before stepping into the bar, I would have likely responded that ‘ _it’s fine_.’ But my opinion evolved rapidly once we were inside. The music was low, the notes bleeding into one another. The singer, all dark lips and smooth hips, sang into the microphone with such a smoky alto intensity that I felt a little high.

Jamie and I took up residence on a pew lining the back wall, our thighs barely touching, our hands curled around tumblers of ice cold, smoky whisky. We watched and listened in silence, just being near to each other. My mind was blank of everything but his warm scent and the music. Between the beer and wine and whisky, I was teetering on the edge of drunk and knew I would feel every ounce of drink in the morning.

“This is great,” I breathed as the band switched out and the singer with the sexy, gray voice hugged the bar’s owner on stage.

“Aye.  I canna carry a tune to save my life, but I ken good music.”

When the music started again Jamie coaxed me to my feet and we danced, his hands around my waist and my wrists draped loosely behind his neck. I did not know if he was holding me close or if I was being sucked into his other worldly gravitational pull.

We walked back to my flat, Jamie declaring that he was memorizing the directions. He lifted me over a puddle and cursed when he stepped in it, the cold water soaking him up to the ankle. We both laughed and he wrapped an arm around my shoulders.

When we arrived at my front door the laughter died and different permutations ran through my head on how I could get him upstairs.  

We stood facing each other on the front steps, awkward and not touching. When he did not make a move, I swallowed hard and stepped forward into his lips. I felt his mouth slip into smile against mine. I was smiling, too, and I could taste the lingering burn of the whisky and the berries and flan we had shared. Our teeth bumped and I felt him swallow as his lips moved impossibly slowly over mine.  I opened my eyes. The beginnings of a five o’clock shadow finely dotted his jaw, stretching over above his lip and along his throat, ghosting along the rise of his Adam’s apple.  I dragged my tongue along his lower lip and he sighed, bringing his hands to my face.

When we finally separated with a quiet, wet sound, I asked, “Are you going to try to sleep with me tonight?”

A corner of his lip quirked, and he looked down at the ground, stepping back. He pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger.  “No.”

“No?” I confirmed, a little incredulous.

“No,” he repeated, his voice as certain as I had ever heard it.  “It’s not the point of tonight. We said a date on dry land.”

I felt bold and reached up to the back of his head, drawing his face closer to mine. “What would your big move have been to get me to go to bed with you?”

“I need a move other than the jazz and the whisky and dazzlin’ conversation?”

I raised my eyebrows, suddenly as confident as his last statement was presumptuous.  I caught a lock of his hair and attempted to slip it behind his ear. It was too short, so I let my fingers trail across the back of his ear. I heard his breath hitch.

“Well, I’d probably touch you… here…” He let his fingers trail down my neck as he moved towards me again. His lips were not even centimeters from mine.  His breath was warm on my lips when he said, “And I’d kiss ye. Slow, soft.”

His eyes were on my lips and I felt my breath catch this time. “Like you just were?”

He made a sound, a  _mmmmm_ of confirmation, that was a full octave lower than his usual tone. “And I’d have a decision to make. Do I undo the zip on yer dress to let it fall off ye or do I work it off from the bottom up?”

“A modern man with many options.” My voice was hoarse, low.

“Aye.” I allowed him to pull me into his chest and swayed with him. It was like the music was still in us.  “I’d probably say something to ye in Gaelic because I ken it gets ye swoony. And that, Claire, is where I need to stop thinking about this and leave ye. ‘Cause if I dinna leave now, I’ll be in yer bed until Tuesday. And tonight is about having a date on dry land.”

“Do you remember what you did to me this morning?” I asked, wondering if I could change his mind. His eyes clouded and then cleared in a single glance.

“Aye, every fuckin’ second of it, Sorcha.” His lips met my cheek, warm against the early winter chill that had cooled the blush right out of my flesh.

“What does that mean?” I asked, unable to stop myself from sounding breathless.

“Go upstairs and Google it.” He gave me one more chaste kiss, squeezed my hand, and turned. I thought I heard him mutter “ _damn_ ” under his breath as he walked down the stairs and away from me.

After removing my makeup and changing into some flannel pajamas, I settled onto my couch with a glass of water to go about my googling.

 _Sorcha. Brightness._ I re-read the words over and over again, smiling stupidly into the sleeve of my pajama top.

My cell phone rang. Jamie sounded distant. “Claire?” he asked, sounding a little tentative. 

“It’s two a.m., James Fraser. I know what calls from men mean at this time of night.” I tucked my knees into my chest and bit down, hard, on my lip. 

“I never said I wouldna call ye, did I?” He paused. I listened to him breathe, wrapping my pinkie finger in the cord of my phone charger.

“I thought our date was going to be on dry land tonight?”

“It’s well after midnight now. It’s not _tonight_ anymore. It’s _tomorrow,_ Sassenach.”

The security button on the panel by my front door buzzed. 

“I’m back,” he said evenly.

I was at my door pressing the button to let him inside before he could say anything else. I listened to the front door buzz open and to his breath as he jogged up the stairs, unlocking the door so he could finally see the inside of my flat.


End file.
